Conservative donors stay the course against GOP establishment

Conservative donors fueling the civil war within the Republican Party are showing no signs of surrender, despite recent losses in primaries and mounting criticism that the groups to which they are giving might damage the GOP’s prospects at winning control of the Senate.

The top conservative groups — Club for Growth and Senate Conservatives Fund — have spent more than $10 million on ads and direct contributions to endorsed candidates in 2014 so far, but they’ve won only in races where establishment groups were largely on the sidelines or supported the same candidate.

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Donors funding these outside groups aren’t demanding their money back or questioning how it was spent, even after Sen. Thad Cochran eked out a win in Mississippi’s GOP runoff, which had widely been seen as the best opportunity for tea party groups to defeat the establishment this year. In fact, those donors are willing to give even more.

Senate Conservatives Fund is still collecting contributions for a legal fund for Chris McDaniel, whom Cochran defeated — the latest indication that the money backing the conservative insurgency is unlikely to dry up anytime soon.

Donors rejected the idea that ensuring a Republican majority in the Senate was more important than which Republicans made it through the primaries, saying in interviews that they will continue writing checks in hopes of eventually electing more staunch conservatives and libertarians focused on reducing the size of government.

“This is a long-term thing,” said Richard Offerdahl, a Nevada-based biotech entrepreneur, who has given about $300,000 in the last two cycles — the bulk of it to Club for Growth and its endorsed candidates. “It’s taken us since Teddy Roosevelt to get to this high-regulation federal situation. It’s a mess. We’ve tried to put patches on patches on patches, and we’ve created a system that’s best for whoever has the best lobbyists. … It’s taken 90 years to get us where we are, it will take another 95 years to get the federal government the way the founders intended.”

He also said that primary outcomes weren’t the only measure of success.

“The thing that tells me they are having some success is that they are driving the Republican Party kicking and screaming to a more fiscally conservative position,” Offerdahl said. “I love my country a great deal, but I don’t love the political establishment that believes that all problems can be fixed with legislation.”

Specifically pointing to immigration reform and Export-Import Bank reauthorization, SCF President Ken Cuccinelli also said that donors knew his group was having an impact in ways beyond election results. “We have always had a long-term goal of making the Senate more conservative, and there are a number of ways to do that,” said Cuccinelli, the GOP’s Virginia gubernatorial nominee last year. “The most obvious way is to win with conservative candidates but, the [Export-Import] bank and liberal attempts at amnesty are dead or on life support this year due to the efforts of the conservative grass roots.”

Donors realize that their contributions are long-term investments, and the primary losses weren’t going to keep them from giving, said Fred Young, heir of the Young Radiator fortune in Wisconsin. “Politics is politics,” said Young. “It’s an ongoing process. You’ve got to keep fighting.”

Young, who has attended the exclusive donor summits organized by Charles and David Koch and sits on the board of the Koch-founded Cato Institute, has given nearly $600,000 in disclosed contributions in the last two election cycles. In the 2014 election alone, he has given $220,000 to Club for Growth and FreedomWorks.